John Cook

Kim Millbrook, a federal prisoner, claims he was sodomized and beaten by prison guards in 2010. He sued the federal government, acting as his own attorney, under the Federal Tort Claims Act. After losing in lower courts—the federal government, they held, can only be liable for the acts of law enforcement officers when those acts are carried out in the course of performing arrests or executing searches, as opposed to just arbitrarily sodomizing inmates—Millbrook wrote out a handwritten petition to the Supreme Court demanding that it hear his case (a copy is here; the image above is from his initial complaint). It did. This morning, with the help of a court-appointed attorney, he won.